How does one calculate cumulative frequency?

Cumulative frequency is calculated by counting the number of scores that are at or below a certain value in a dataset. This approach allows you to understand how many data points fall within a specified range, which is particularly useful for creating cumulative frequency distributions or graphs.

To derive the cumulative frequency, you start with the lowest score and add the frequency of each subsequent score or group of scores. As you progress through the dataset, you accumulate the counts, ultimately leading to a total that represents how many observations fall under or equal to each value. This method is foundational for understanding distributions and is often used in statistical analysis to summarize data.

The other approaches do not provide a correct method for calculating cumulative frequency. Simply adding all scores together does not yield useful information regarding their distribution. Counting from the highest to the lowest, while related to sorting data, does not specifically handle cumulative counts. Finding the mode, which identifies the most frequently occurring score in a dataset, does not involve the concept of cumulative frequency at all.